In the 1900s, Albert Einstein unified the concepts of space and time, giving us a useful new way to picture the universe. At the start of the 20th century, physicists had a problem: The speed of light ...

Once the most popular framework for physics beyond the Standard Model, supersymmetry is facing a reckoning—but many researchers are not giving up on it yet. The Standard Model of particle physics is ...

The Planck scale sets the universe’s minimum limit, beyond which the laws of physics break. In the late 1890s, physicist Max Planck proposed a set of units to simplify the expression of physics laws.

Scientists around the world are testing ways to further boost the power of particle accelerators while drastically shrinking their size. At least when it comes to particle accelerators, bigger is ...

As technology improves, scientists discover new ways to search for theorized dark matter particles called axions. In the early 1970s, physics had a symmetry problem. According to the Standard Model, ...

Take an interactive animated journey through the particle physics alphabet. Accelerators and black holes and cryostats, oh my! We know particle physics can seem daunting at times, but everything’s ...

A forthcoming upgrade to the IceCube detector will provide deeper insights into the elusive particles. Underneath the vast, frozen landscape of the South Pole lies IceCube, a gigantic observatory ...

Neutrinos don’t seem to get their mass in the same way as other particles in the Standard Model. In 1998, researchers made a discovery that challenged their understanding of particle physics and ...

The stuff of daily existence is made of atoms, and all those atoms are made of the same three things: electrons, protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are very similar particles in most respects.

Something is out there. As far as scientists know, just 15% of the matter in the universe is the ordinary kind we can see. The other 85%, called dark matter, remains beyond detection, invisibly ...

Meet the short-lived particle that helps the sun shine. Visible matter is made from only a handful of particles, but many more are behind the scenes, affecting what those matter particles do. The W ...

The answer has to do with dark matter’s role in shaping the cosmos. Half a century after Vera Rubin and Kent Ford confirmed that a form of invisible matter—now called dark matter—is required to ...